Wirthis Blog

I now host and operate several wikis based on the MediaWiki software. Using the Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) I recently saw that none of my images hosted in those wikis are indexed by Google. To be more precise: The description pages of the images are not indexed. All configuration seemed to be Google-friendly, for instance, a robots.txt existed and was configured correctly, an XML sitemap (including the image description pages) was sent to Googles WMT, no "noindex" or "nofollow" code was in the pages, etc. So, why is Google not indexing my images? During quite some research I found several other people describing in blog posts and discussion forum threads that they had similar problems. It took me quite some while to get a first real clue, though. Note that the URL of the description pages follows the same structure all the time: www.domain.com/wiki/Name.jpg Ok, that's only true if you use URL rewriting to get such "nice" URLs - if you use the bas...

Anybody who's using MediaWiki might discover that the automatically created thumbnails are of low (if not really bad) quality. This might be a less pressing problem when using SVGs, but many of my JPEGs looked really really bad. The MediaWiki documentation suggest using ImageMagick instead of of GD (see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Image_Administration#Image_thumbnailing ). However, that's what I'm using. Improving Quality I've done two steps to improve the quality of the thumbnails. Both might or might not be applicable to your images - it often depends on the type of content you present, the quality and size of the images you upload and their content (images of nature, computer-generated graphs, etc.). JPEG quality MediaWiki uses an JPEG quality of "80%". This compresses the thumbnails (they are smaller and can be downloaded faster by the users). However, the quality suffers with that lower number, as more artifacts can be seen. I tried setting the...